About The Optimal Retirement
Planner

The Optimal Retirement Planner (ORP)
was originally built to demonstrate the feasibility of implementing
a computationally intensive process on an Internet web site that is directed
at the retail market. ORP is built using tools and techniques developed
in the field of Operations Research over the last 60 years.

Table 1: ORP Web Site Architecture

The core of ORP is an industrial strength linear programming optimizer (BOSC)
originally built by William Orchard_Hays and used mostly in feed blending applications.
The optimizer is surrounded by a model management system (MathPro), and
it's relational database, that describes the
model, builds the LP matrix and processes the solution results.
MathPro is used mostly for petro chemical refinery simulations. The outer
layer is a Perl implemented Common Gateway Interface (CGI) Script that communicates
with the browser based client. This simple, straightforward, elegant architecture
has remained in place since 1996 surviving many changes to application side
of the model.

Linear Programming

Linear Programming (LP) is applicable when a process can be
modeled by a set of linear equations. Normally the set will have more variables than
equations and thus have no unique solution. LP's objective function
assigns
a profit or cost to each variable. George Danzig' elegant Simplex Method
efficiently finds a
solution to the equation set that maximizes the objective function.
While this solution is not unique the Simplex Method quarentees that is
no better solution.

A typical ORP model has:

700 equations,

900 vaiables,

0.5% density,

solves in under 2 seconds

looks at 900 potential solutions.

Personnel

James S. Welch, Jr
(Resume)
is the principle architect, formulator and implementer of ORP.
Significant contributions were also made by: